Xbox One chews through hard drive space

As most already know, one of the most interesting things about the Xbox One is its ability to install games from the disc to the hard drive while you are already playing the game. The automatic hard drive installation however brings up an issue that could raise its head much sooner than later which is that the 500GB drive in the Xbox One just may simply be too small of a drive for many users that play a lot of games.

Initial Xbox One launch titles have hard drive space requirements that run as little as 2.6GB to as much as 43GB for the Xbox One version of NBA 2K14. With games using this kind of hard drive space and the fact that the hard drive in the Xbox One is not user replaceable or upgradeable like the hard drive was in the Xbox 360, this could be a real issue much sooner than Microsoft is expecting.

The release titles that we have been able to run down have the following installation size requirements:

Our sources tell us that once Microsoft gets past the initial launch, it will then have to look at what consumers want and if the need for a console with a larger hard drive is something that is necessary and something buyers want, we would expect Microsoft to respond to those needs. Of course the Xbox One will support the addition of USB 2/3 external hard drives and flash memory sticks which could end up being Microsoft long term go to answer.

Still it is surprising that many of the games are installing 30+GB of data to the hard drive. When a Blu-ray dual-layer Blu-ray disc can hold 50GB, I guess we should not really be that surprised. We expect that hard drive space on the 500B drive could be at a premium by this time next year and some users are going to get really good at managing their drive space.